What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday?

[Rev. Rye]

When I went to Nashville five years ago, I liked the biscuits there so much that I decided to figure out how to make them. And it never quite felt the same, even after reading up on Alton Brown's recipe.

Then I found out about the big catch: a specific type of flour that's almost never found in Chicago. According to Robert Dixon Phillips:  “you want a flour made from a soft wheat, It has less gluten protein and the gluten is weaker, which allows the chemical leavening—the baking powder—to generate carbon dioxide and make it rise up in the oven... Hard wheats [read: the sort of wheats that the vast majority of flour available here are made from] are higher in gluten protein, and when they’re turned into a dough, the dough is very strong and elastic and can trap carbon dioxide."

And apparently, it turns out that, even though the local Jewel doesn't stock White Lily (at least, I don't think they do, I didn't check when I went there yesterday), it's actually possible to mimic it in a shockingly simple way:

And, if the Alton Brown recipe is any indication, presumably, I should add 2 tsp of baking powder (and maybe a fraction of a teaspoon of salt) for every cup of the hybrid flour.

And now, the actual recipe that Alton Brown's grandmother plugged in his recipe to complete the proper biscuit synthesis.

https://smile.amazon.com/White-Lily-Risi...155&sr=8-2

In my quest to try something like this without the huge markup, I went to my regular supermarket to try the equal parts cake flour and all-purpose flour trick. And by an extraordinary coincidence, my flour reserves were exactly 13 cups’ worth, as much as 2 boxes of Swans Down cake flour. It turns out that not only do we not stock White Lily, we don’t even stock cake flour. Cake mixes, sure, but with all the extra ingredients, that’s not going to help.

And then it turns out there’s actually a chain that apparently sells the genuine article and there’s one about two miles from my home.

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Today, I learned that Flannery O'Connor wrote creepypasta. Seriously.

Yeah, not so much.

Boru

Yeah, it was really jarring to see the Creepypasta wiki and find in the “suggested reading” category a Flannery O’Connor story. Then again, further research reveals there’s a lot of pre-Internet horror stories In that category (with Poe, Bierce, Kafka, Howard, and Lovecraft getting their own sub-categories), though this is the only one that is unambiguously still copywritten.